


The Room in the Back

by malyce



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, but he's still a brat, draco redemption, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-15 00:09:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/843031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malyce/pseuds/malyce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know those Draco redemptionista stories we all hate?  This is one of them.  Sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Room in the Back

On the top story of the Black mansion, there was a room that hadn't been used in decades. It was more of a glorified alcove than a bedroom. In most homes, rooms like this would be used to store Quidditch brooms, potion ingredients, or anything else that the residents wanted to keep out of sight. In this house, it was home to a person whose existence the Order of the Phoenix would have preferred to forget. Draco Malfoy's bed was shoved haphazardly into the sharp corner where the two sides of the roof met at an angle. The only other objects in the room were a makeshift beside table, Draco's wand and a change of clothing that was hanging from the rafters.

 

"We don't have any more bedrooms available," Remus Lupin had said apologetically, "Sirius Black left the house to me because he thought that we'd always have enough space to shelter anyone who needed sanctuary from You-Know-Who. I guess he never knew just how powerful the Order would become."

At the time, Draco was too tired to snap that he knew for a fact that there were plenty of unoccupied bed chambers. The smaller the room, the easier it was to bewitch it so that the occupant couldn't enter or leave without anyone knowing. The room at the back was where they put people that they suspected of being traitors.

Their suspicions didn't bother him. His reasons for joining the Order were personal, not heroic. He didn't have the patience for any of that antiquated rambling about friendship and comradery.

He really was a lot more comfortable thinking of Potter, Granger, and Weasley as the enemy. The fact that they were... well, kind of right about Lord Voldemort made Draco very uneasy. He would have given anything at that moment to learn that they were all spies for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-But-Usually-Was-Anyway-In-The-House-of-Black so that he could go back to hating them without having to think of them as his allies.

He gazed up at the rafters and felt more homesick than ever. His bedroom in the Malfoy house had a feather bed and a large fireplace. He missed his room. He missed his mother. He missed sneaking out of the house with his cousins during the summer after his father was distracted. Draco missed many things.

The other students had sadly said goodbye to their professors after graduation, looking at their teachers as if they were trying to memorize their faces even though their parents had already shot a billion moving photographs of them. After Draco's parents had left for the reception in the great hall, Professor Snape had slipped a piece of paper into the sleeve of his green graduation robe. Amid the sounds of a thousand wands shooting celebratory sparks and the shouts of "we made it," Snape had whispered eleven words in Draco's ear: "You'll know where to find me if you get into trouble." As he whispered, the sounds of the party seemed to fade into silence and Professor Snape's voice was as loud as if he had been shouting.

At the time, Draco had suppressed laughter. He usually didn't resist the urge to mock people, and most of them deserved it. All of his classmates were stupid, self-righteous, or had ugly scars on their foreheads that made everyone shower them with attention for no good reason. He didn't mind pointing this out to any of them.

He kept his opinion of other people to himself only when they were dumb enough to be useful or in the extremely rare cases when they had actually managed to earn his respect. Snape wasn't an idiot; how could he possibly thing that he, Draco Malfoy, would get into any kind of trouble? However, he knew he couldn't make fun of Professor Snape. He didn't spare his students' feelings or tiptoe around the truth, and all of the Malfoys admired that. He was also the only teacher at Hogwarts who didn't treat Draco as if he were a revolting, yet dangerous insect.

His father was a Death Eater, he came from a long line of pureblood wizards, and Lord Voldemort's power was growing every day. If anything, he was sure that his life was about to take a turn for the better. That was before the night of his twentieth birthday, when his father had taken him to meet Lord Voldemort.

The first time he saw Voldemort's face, Draco knew that he couldn't be one of them. His eyes seemed to be absorbing Draco, turning him into a hollow shell to be used at his own discretion.

He put a hand to his left cheek, where Narcissa had slapped him after he had threatened to run away. He had rushed up the stairs to his bedroom and thrown his closet door open, not caring that the door had slammed the wall a little too loudly. He found what he was looking for; a blank piece of parchment that had been hidden in the crack beneath the wall and the floor. When he unfolded it, there was an address written in Professor Snape's spidery handwriting.

He had barely had time to throw a few clothes into his trunk and sneak out of the house through the complex maze of secret passageways. He knew every inch of the house, but Lucius didn't know that his son had spent his time exploring the maze as a child.

When he found Snape, Draco didn't cry, but he stared straight ahead, feeling his face growing red as he told his mentor what had happened. There was heat behind his eyes, and pressure that had never been relieved.

"Are you with us or against us?" Snape had asked, "There is no option but those two." As Draco had started to speak, his potions master had interrupted him, "Do not give me the 'I've-got-nowhere-else-to-go speech. I've heard enough of those to last several lifetimes," Snape sighed, "really, Draco, I would have expected more from you. I'm not Dumbledore, after all." Draco didn't have to tell Snape that this was precisely why he admired him.

"I'm with you." he said, "I'm with you, Professor Snape." He saw his lips curl into a half smile, and Draco realized how funny it must sound to hear a student who had graduated two years before address him as "Professor."

In the privacy of his makeshift bedroom, Draco had allowed himself the indulgence of shouting into his pillow. All his life, he had thought of the Death Eaters as powerful dark wizards, not spineless minions of someone who was pulling the strings. Killing muggles was one thing, but this? Lucius and Narcissa had changed because of Lord Voldemort. His mother and father weren't his parents any longer, but had surrendered themselves to the dark lord. He punched the pillow hard enough to send several feathers flying, and glared at the opposite wall for a few minutes before he went to sleep. He wouldn't bury his face in his hands and sob like a baby; Draco Malfoy never cried.

It had been a few minutes after midnight when Draco finally found the courage to ask his former professor the question that had been on his mind.

"Why did you tell me to find you?" They were sitting in the kitchen of the House of Black, and Snape was leafing through a pile of papers that looked both important and confidential.

"You're not particularly nice, Draco Malfoy," said Snape, "but there are much more useful things to be. I thought you had some intelligence and potential. Even if you are a bit... rash at times. You sometimes act without thinking of the consequences."

"You mean like telling my father that I hoped he was hit with a million unforgivable curses at once because I was never coming home again?"

"That's certainly one example," Snape answered, "I also knew that you weren't going to turn into your father, no matter what you said while you were in school." It felt as if a million years had passed since his time at Hogwarts. He truly didn't want to end up like Lucius.

"Lucius is weak," he said finally. Draco had stopped calling him "father" a long time ago, "he let Voldemort control him, but you didn't." He sighed, "I thought that when Lord Voldemort came back to power, my father would take charge of the Death Eaters. He could have done something useful with them."

He saw Snape's hand travel to his arm. He knew that Lord Voldemort's mark was still seared into his skin, and Draco wondered if his former professor had felt it when the dark wizard rose again. When Snape caught him staring at his arm, he quickly relaxed his shoulders and placed his hands on the kitchen table.

"Things change," he told him, "I saw things that I couldn't rightfully excuse."

"I know what you mean," said Draco, thinking of Lord Voldemort's eyes and shuddering. Of all the things he had seen, of all the things he had done, he didn't think he would ever get that image out of his mind.

He gave up his most recent attempt to get some sleep, and stood up. He felt his stomach gurgle, and groaned. Refusing to eat with his former rivals had its drawbacks. The cold meat that Remus Lupin delivered to his room had been difficult to swallow, and he finally became too nauseous to eat anymore. He rotated his shoulders so that his spine cracked. Draco opened the door, and crept quietly to the stairs.

He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and Draco gritted his teeth. He had managed to avoid seeing Harry Potter for most of the day. When they found themselves at the same doorway or in the same room, they usually nodded coldly at each other, and then moved in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. The Black mansion was enormous; it wasn't difficult to avoid him.

"Hey," he said politely, as if he was approaching a deadly monster with whom someone needed to reason. He looked at the half open door to the back room, and Draco hurried to close it.

Not now, he silently begged fate, please don't let this go where I think it's going. He could handle Potter's hatred. He could relish in Potter's envy, but Draco didn't want Scarhead to pity him. A filthy blooded nobody like Harry Potter couldn't possibly feel sorry for him.

It was too late; Harry had seen the room. He probably knew all about the spell and the reasons why Draco had been given the storage closet instead of one of the luxurious bedrooms in the Black mansion.

"When I lived with my aunt and uncle," Harry continued, "they made me sleep in the room under the stairs."

"They probably thought that your fleas would infect everyone else in the house," Draco grumbled. The last thing he needed was for the great Harry Potter to magnanimously decide to speak to the lowly Draco Malfoy. He was didn't have time for a conversation this stupid.

"It was really cramped and uncomfortable," Harry added, as if this insignificant fact would alter Draco's entire perception of him. He sneered at Harry, hoping that his look said something along the lines of Yeah? Your point being? What was Harry trying to say? I know what you're going through? We're a lot alike if you think about it? "Whatever happened between us at school, I hope that things..." he didn't finish his sentence. It was obvious that Harry had rehearsed this speech, but was finally realizing how ridiculous it sounded out loud. Whatever happened between us at school, indeed. Draco thought as he rolled his eyes.

"Look," he snapped, closing the door to his pitiful excuse for a bedroom, "I don't want to be your friend, Potter. I'm not too happy about having to share a house with you lot of disgusting muggle wannabes, and I certainly don't want the room next to yours. Your auntie and uncle were mean to you. Boo-hoo. We have a club for people who didn't get along with their families. It's called everyone in this bloody house, and we meet for dinner every day at six. Or in my case, we eat dinner in my room. Alone." He opened the door again, and tried to block the entrance so that Harry couldn't see just how small and how depressing it looked, "Good thing, too!" he yelled, "I think that the sight of a table surrounded by your kind would make me lose my appetite! I don't even want to go on missions with the lot of you, but-"

"THEN WHY DO YOU?" Harry shouted. The empty walls echoed with his last exclamation, so it sounded as if there were a thousand Harry Potters lined up in the hallway shouting Why do you?

"Because," Draco replied. He said nothing more. The door down the hall creaked open, and he saw one of the Weasley twins appear into the hallway.

"Sorry, George," Harry grimaced. So it's George, not Fred. Draco thought. It was always funny to see their reactions when he "accidentally" called one of them by his brother's name. He looked at Draco with sleepy indignation.

"Do I need to turn him back into a ferret?"

"You do and I'll explode your entrails, you filthy blood traitor." Draco snarled.

"Ease off, kiddo, I was just joking." George ruffled his blond hair, knowing that it would make him homicidal, "Though I've gotta say; I liked you better as a rodent." Draco caught sight of his reflection in one of the windows; his hair was sticking up in several directions, making him look like an angry dandelion.

"George," said Harry, "Just... let's go downstairs." He gave Draco one last look as he led George away from him.

Because.

He didn't think that Harry Potter was overly intelligent, but knew that he would understand the gravity of that single word. Harry didn't ask for another explanation, but simply walked back down the corridor that led to the stairs so that Draco could open the door to his room and lock himself away from this house full of people with whom he shared nothing in common except an enemy. He was still hungry, still restless, and still annoyed, but it would soon be morning.

As he finger-combed his tangled hair, Draco thought about what his former potions master had said to him; You're not particularly nice. No, he wasn't a very nice person, but they were at war. Nice people who did as they were told were useless against Lord Voldemort. The Order of the Phoenix had enough nice witches and wizards to start a magical nursery school. It didn't matter that they liked him or how many times Ginny boxed his ears when he called Harry a moron for getting his godfather killed. They needed someone who had the stomach to do what Draco Malfoy could do and see what he could see. He shivered in the darkness. Blankets were for weaklings, and he would personally march into the closest headquarters of the Death Eaters and face his own father before he went crying to Lupin that he was freezing. Snape was right; there were better things to be than nice and more important things at stake than where he was sleeping. With that thought in mind, he rolled over and tried to find the most comfortable position possible.


End file.
